Journal

The journal gives every day its own page, in the spirit of Logseq’s journals. Open it, and today’s page is ready to write in. Use it for a running log, meeting notes, or quick thoughts you’ll sort out later.

The Journal: a month calendar with dots on days that have a page, the days listed newest first, and today's page open with tasks, standup notes, and a linked mention from Weekly planning

Today’s page

  • Click Journal in the sidebar, or press ⌘⇧J from anywhere. Today’s page opens, and is created if it doesn’t exist yet.
  • The note list shows a month calendar above your days, newest first. Days with a page have a dot. Click any day, past or future, to open or start its page.
  • On a journal page, ‹ and › next to the date step to the previous and next day (⌥⌘← / ⌥⌘→). Today jumps back.

Journal pages are ordinary notes: they show up in All Notes, and search, tags, tasks, queries, backlinks, version history and export all work on them. The Journal is a view of just the days, ordered by date.

Linking to a day

A day’s page is titled with its date in YYYY-MM-DD form, so [[2026-10-13]] links to it.

  • Type [[today, [[yesterday or [[tomorrow and the link autocomplete offers that day’s date.
  • Clicking a link to a day without a page starts that page.
  • Linked mentions at the bottom of a day lists every note that links to it. Writing “Call the bank on [[2026-10-20]]” in any note puts that line under October 20.

A template for new days

Create a note titled Journal Template. Each new day’s page starts with its body (everything after the title heading). These placeholders are filled in:

Placeholder Becomes
`` The day, e.g. 2026-10-13
`` The day before ([[]] links to it)
`` The day after
`` The day’s name, e.g. Tuesday 
# Journal Template

## 

- [ ] Review [[]]

### Notes

Changing the template only affects pages created afterwards.

On disk

A journal page is a normal note file with one extra frontmatter line:

---
id: 9a1e…
title: 2026-10-13
…
journal: 2026-10-13
---

# 2026-10-13

A note titled with a bare date, such as a daily note brought over from Obsidian or Logseq, becomes that day’s page the first time you open the day.

From the command line and AI assistants

tagdown journal prints today’s page, and tagdown journal "text" appends to it. Name a day with YYYY-MM-DD, yesterday or tomorrow. The MCP server offers read_journal and append_to_journal. See Command line and AI assistants.